1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a node and a method of transmitting packets from the node. More particularly, the invention relates to a node for transmitting packets using a directional antenna that utilizes actors to select efficient directional anycast routing paths, and to a method of transmitting packets from the node.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) are composed of various devices referred to as sensor nodes, actor nodes, and sink nodes.
The sensor node may be a low-cost power constrained-resource device capable of communicating in short distances, and the actor node may typically be a resource-rich device with a higher processing capability, higher transmission capability, and longer battery life or renewable energy.
The actor node may collect and process data and perform actions on the environment based on the information gathered. The sensor nodes, actor nodes, and sink nodes may need to coordinate and collaborate to execute their tasks.
A critical routing issue in WSANs is to minimize delay and energy consumption. Although recent researches are specifically investigated in coordination and communication problems in the WSAN, the literature on this topic is still limited.
In a WSAN, there may be four main kinds of traffic, including sensor-sink, sensor-sensor, sensor-actor, actor-actor communication. The first two communication patterns are familiar in the field of wireless sensor networks and the others have arisen from a new entity of actor putting on the wireless sensor network.
The current approaches for the WSAN may reuse the protocols for sensor-sensor and sensor-sink from sensor networks and then propose new protocols for sensor-actor and actor-actor communication.
However, such approaches separate different protocols for different traffic patterns. In particular, sensor-actor coordination may be based on event-driven paradigm, and actor-actor coordination may be based on distributed solution in a theory framework.
Although these protocols might run well in some cases, the overall performance of the WSAN may not be so good, because these may cause the network to be complex and desultory, which is not suitable for constrained sensor node devices.
Therefore, an investigation is needed of a unified protocol of a unified framework for arbitrary traffic in the WSAN.